Why I am not a Heideggerian # 1
The title would be pretty self-regarding if I meant it seriously, obviously. Like you should care whether I'm a Heideggerian. It's a Bertrand Russell, Ibn Warraq, Luc Ferry/Alain Renault homage thing, is what it is.
Anyway, it was a post on Crooked Timber (http://crookedtimber.org/2005/06/04/heidegger-and-the-nazis-again/) that sparked off a train of thought about Heidegger. And the real reason that I'm not a Heideggerian is not really that his politics and his conduct were on the nasty side. Though they were that. It's more that his work seems to have increased the world's store of philosophical terminology without having increased the store of philosophical ideas. I've never found his terminology, nor the accompanying concepts, useful for thinking about or discussing any question.
Try this bit of Heideggerese, not unfairly selected or unusually obtuse, from Introduction to Metaphysics:
"Not only does conflict give rise to the essent; it also preserves the essent in its permanence. Where struggle ceases, the essent does not vanish, but the world turns away. The essent is no longer asserted (preserved as such). Now it is merely found ready made; it is datum. ... The eye, the vision, which originally projected the project into immediacy, becomes a mere looking over, or looking at or gaping at."
"The essent" is a translation of Heidegger's own coinage "das Seiende", meaning roughly "that which is, or some specific thing that is".
So this passage says that things are created by conflict (Kampf). Things are apparently preserved if this conflict continues. But if conflict stops, things still exist, though in some sense of existing that does not involve preservation. Anyway, people now turn away from these things, that were created by conflict, and which still exist on the cessation of conflict, though they are not preserved. (By "the world" Heidegger surely meant "people".) However, although people turn away from those things, they become data, "givens", with a ready-made identity. Moreover, the eye used to project those things into immediacy, back when conflict reigned, but post-Kampf the eye only looks at the things, which is clearly not as good.
The passage illustrates my five real quarrels with Heidegger.
First, coinages like "das Seiende" seem pointless. Is there a nuance of difference in meaning between "a thing" or "things" and "a thing that exists" or "things that exist", that is conveyed by that word, and for which the new word is required or even useful? It doesn't seem so. And Heidegger's Essents dance hand-in-hand with his Da-Seins, self-standings and standing in itselfs, present at hands and ready to hands, fallennesses, Ur-Grund, Ab-Grund and Un-Grund, and lots of other abstract entities. Occam said not to multiply entities without necessity. Heidegger multiplied nouns without necessity. It's like someone developing a new system of musical notation and claiming their music must be new and original because it's written in new symbols.
Second, Heidegger asserts rather than argues. He pronounces, and goes on pronouncing. Obviously citing one fragment does not prove that, but I make that as an observation based on reading about 300 pages of Heidegger, all up, plus some explication (That's some of his Neitzsche book, most of Sein und Zeit, all of Introduction to Metaphysics, and some lectures and letters; no expert, but I think it's enough to get the flavour.)
Third, Heidegger's statements, in so far as they are intelligible, are frequently false and this does not seem to trouble him. For example it is not true that "the essent" arises from conflict (some essents may, while others may not). It is not true that "the world turns away" from an essent that is not subject to conflict. "The world" may focus its fresh vision on a thing for many reasons other than conflict: consider Wordsworth's field of daffs, for example. And it is not true, insofar as the claim has any meaning, that things are no longer "asserted" if they are no longer subject to conflict.
Fourth, not all of Heidegger's assertions appear to have meaning. Any sentence beginning "the eye, the vision", as if these two are the same thing, is in trouble, and things don't improve as it goes on. What does "project the project into immediacy" mean? And even if Heidegger meant that without conflict we don't have an immediate vision of things, but only look at them, what does that mean, anyway?
Fifth, Heidegger's writing is a mixture of two styles: the pompous-oracular style of a California mystic, eg that stuff about "the eye, the vision"; and the lifeless tedium of a Brussells bureaucrat writing page 357 of the Heat Treatment for Milk Product Regulations 2005, eg the rest of it.
The above is not "a refutation of Heidegger", obviously. It's only an explanation of why I don't find him useful, especially interesting, or Big and Clever.
And on top of that, was he a Nazi? And if so, was the Nazism connected to his philosophy, in areas outside of his directly political writing? I think the answer to both questions is yes, but I'll argue those two in the next post.
posted by Laon | 1:53 AM
2 Comments:
I don't know why some translators chose the made-up word "essent" for "das Seiende", which is simply the participle form as a noun: the existent, the beingness of beings, in contrast to "Being", are alternatives. The point there, simply enough, is that beings "resist", in the sense of never being reducible to, any appropriations we might make of them, which is part of the sense of saying that they are, exist. But beings are also necessarily taken up into "the world" as an active referential structure of meaning-horizons, in terms of which they are interpreted and appear more or less as they are. "Being", in contrast to the beingness of beings, is sheer background, the notion being derived from Husserl's "horizon", that which "gives" beings, ("es gibt"= "there is") as interpretable, as what must be interpreted, and thereby taken up into an order of Being. That's one of the irritating things about Heidegger, the way his seemingly endless expatiations *about* Being seem to turn it into a substantive. But the point is that beings, as given their sense by Being, must always already be interpreted, and that interpretation is at once historically finite and inexhaustible. Hence, the "struggle" involved, ("Kampf", another bad translator's choice), to preserve beings in their beingness. The classical metaphysical definition of being as that which remains the same amidst all change, "presence", is at once being referred to and challenged here. But it is not "people" who quite decide here, since their language,- (the "dwelling", rather than the "house", another translator's choice, of Being), is the condition rather than the product of their "will". Hence the struggle is one of acceptance, of reception, of "coming to terms with". Only such struggle sustains the "belonging together", as opposed to metaphysical unity, of what is. The projection of the project, surely an ugly phrase, into immediacy indicates that the project which sustains Being, always as much practical as experiential or cognitive, itself has a temporally distended structure, an "historicity", which is why it enters into, rather than being identical with, immediacy. The much derided pleonasms of Heidegger's discourse, the "nothing nothings" or "the essence essences", are precisely intended to shift the sense from a substantive to a verbal import; that is, to draw into question the substantialism of traditional Western metaphysical thinking. The nothing nothings because meaning is not intrinsic to, entrapped within, the metaphysical form of things, but is given by "nothing", precisely by not being a substance. The essence essences precisely because "essence" is a process that changes historically, that transforms "itself", rather than being an invariant product of the beingness of beings. The cited passage then amounts simply to a criticism of representation, to regarding beings as merely a representation to a "mind", a datum in a theory, without regard to the involvements that make even such representation possible, that would give it its sense, other than as an arbitrary instrumental mastery of "presence".
There is no requirement to take any interest in Heidegger. And certainly there are many trenchant criticisms to be made of his work. But certainly, if one wants to address that work, one needs to make some real effort at understanding, at making sense of it. Prejudicial dismissal is of no account, even if Heidegger's own Nazi involvement, however one construes or interprets it or assesses its extent, should amount to a precautionary principle, with the benefit of hindsight and taking account of a 90 year life. Heidegger himself was terse, often to the point of dismissal, but equally, he was a phenomenologist, committed to description, even if describing is also interpreting, rather, than to explicit argument, as a means of questioning premises, rather than putting them forth. I myself am at best half, probably more like a quarter, sympathetic to Heidegger's approach and "argument". I think that there are more perspicuous approaches to the issues that he raises. And I care little whether he adds to the stock of concepts, rather than criticizing/shifting the perspective on the stock of concepts already historically/traditionally given. (The "Kampf" surely alluded to the Heraclitan "polemos".) But a refusal of the stakes of understanding is a "lesser" sin, compared to Heidegger's "greater" sin.
I’ll kick off with two apologies, first for the lateness of this response, and secondly for spelling your name wrong.
1. "Seiende" is a neologism in German; the translators that chose "essent" did so in order to relate it to the Latin "esse"/"to be", as their nearest equivalent. As to whether that translator's neologism is clearer than your "the existent, the beingness of beings, in contrast to 'Being', I don't have a strong opinion.
2 I have two problems with the statement, "beings 'resist', in the sense of never being reducible to, any appropriations we might make of them, which is part of the sense of saying that they are, [they] exist."
My first problem with the statement is that saying "beings are not reducible to any appropriations we might make of them" does not have an obvious meaning. Especially since "appropriation" means "the act of taking possession"; obviously nothing can be reduced to the act of taking possession of it. The act of appropriating a lupin is not itself a lupin. And so on.
If by "appropriations" you mean something like "grasp", and therefore perhaps "understanding", then you're saying that beings, or Beings, or "beings", or "Beings", or existentiales, or entities, or things, or some such, are not the same as the understanding we have about them. This is also true. A truism, in fact.
Anyway your statement continues: to say that beings are not reducible to their appropriations, is part of saying that beings exist.
This does not seem obvious to me. Except in the sense that any statement about anything is part of saying that it exists. If you say something is not blue, you have applied the verb "to be" to it, and (some might argue) thereby suggested its existence.
Of course this doesn't work so well with concepts that refer to things that do not exist. A unicorn is not reducible to any appropriation we might make if it (since the concept unicorn has a vaster range of meanings and variants than can be grasped, and its meanings are in any case constantly expanding), and yet to say that about a unicorn is not part of saying that it exists.
Sorry to take so long with one sentence, in fact part of a sentence. But I have similar problems with many sentences in your post, which do not – to me at least – have a clear meaning, and nor does close reading improve the situation much.
3 This thing about "the world" can make decisions, alter focus or perceptions, or whether it’s people who did that. Heidegger likes things like perception, etc, to be done by abstract nouns rather than by people, but the reality is that it is done by people. True, for example, as you say, language is not a product of any one person, and it is something that conditions how that person thinks and perceives; nevertheless, the production of language is done by humans, jointly, and not by "the world". The production of language is as much a sociological phenomenon as it is a metaphysical one. Or perhaps more so. Things are done by people, not animated abstractions.
4 'Kampf' is not "a bad translator's choice", it is the German word that Heidegger used. The echo between Heidegger's discourse and Nazi language is not a product of translation. ("Kampf" is not just Hitler's booktitle, but a key word in ther speeches and articles of Rosenberg and Goebbels too, as well as the ordinary, lower-level Nazi propaganda and writing.) I do not think that "argument from verbal echo" is enough to decide any question of influence on its own, since verbal echoes are easy to manufacture through careful selection. In this particular instance think the echo is probably real an significant, and it is not a product of the translator.
5 I think the key ideas in Heidegger can be discussed more easily without Heidegger's verbal formulations, which seem to me to get in the way of clear reasoning, rather than being helpful to understanding.
I've got to go (film festival's afoot), so I'll post this as is.
Laon
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